Language knowledge and event knowledge in language use

This paper examines how semantic knowledge is used in language comprehension and in making judgments about events in the world. We contrast knowledge gleaned from prior language experience (“language knowledge”) and knowledge coming from prior experience with the world (“world knowledge”). In two corpus analyses, we show that previous research linking verb aspect and event representations have confounded language and world knowledge. Then, using carefully chosen stimuli that remove this confound, we performed four experiments that manipulated the degree to which language knowledge or world knowledge should be salient and relevant to performing a task, finding in each case that participants use the type of knowledge most appropriate to the task. These results provide evidence for a highly context-sensitive and interactionist perspective on how semantic knowledge is represented and used during language processing.     

X good things in life: Processing fluency effects in the “Three good things in life” exercise

The present study examined whether difficulty of recollection may influence the effectiveness of the “Three good things in life” exercise that has previously been shown to increase happiness. Participants were randomly assigned to write 1–10 good things that happened to them during the day in the course of two weeks. We measured life satisfaction, positive and negative affect before the exercise and three times after the exercise. We found no effect of the number of good things participants wrote each day. Life satisfaction and positive affect of participants did not increase after the two weeks of the exercise, but we found a reduction in negative affect. We further investigated various aspects of the exercise in exploratory analyses.     

Increased accessibility of semantic concepts after (more or less) subtle activation of related concepts: support for the basic tenet of priming research

Abstract

Increasingly remote concepts and behaviors have been primed, which have come under increasing criticism. In this present experiment, we take a step back and try to strengthen the roots of priming research. In this experiment, we systematically varied the activation or priming of a concept in six experiments (N?=?1285). We then measured accessibility for semantic concepts using a word stem completion task. Across the six experiments, our investigations showed that the activation of semantic concepts is possible through greater accessibility of semantically congruent words (with only one experiment failing to reach a conventional level of significance). These results provide a prerequisite for further investigation into behavioral priming. The present experiment showed that the basal priming mechanisms are robust effects. The meta-analytic integration showed that women reliably had access to more baby-related words. A possible explanation is that social role stereotypes associate women more with the reproductive sphere than men and that women, to a certain extent, internalize these societal views. Other explanations and potential future applications are discussed.     

The distinct contributions of cause–effect order and reasoning type in judgments of causality

ABSTRACT

People generally perceive a stronger link between smoking and cancer than between cancer and smoking. Generally, prior research on asymmetrical causal reasoning has not distinguished predictive (searching for effects) and diagnostic reasoning (searching for causes) from the order in which causes and effects are presented. Across 6 studies (overall N = 627), we show that order and reasoning have an additive influence on the causality perception: causes, spatially or temporally presented before the effect, strengthen the causality attribution associated to predictive (vs. diagnostic) frames. Moreover, we show that order and reasoning frame are bi-directionally related, as the cause-first order triggers predictive reasoning and vice versa, and people mentally maintain the cause-first order when envisaging a causal relation. Besides its methodological contribution to the causal reasoning literature, this research demonstrates the powerful role of word order in causal reasoning. Implications for the role of word order in communication and risk prevention are discussed.     

Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

ABSTRACT

Perceptual fluency typically has a positive influence on aesthetic evaluations of beauty, but few studies have examined its influence on creativity evaluations. Creativity has two facets, originality and quality. If creativity judgments involve estimating product originality, such judgments may be associated with perceptual disfluency, while product quality may be associated with perceptual fluency. We examined the relationship between perceptual fluency and judgments of creativity and beauty across seven experiments. Creativity judgments were affected by most perceptual fluencysources. We observed a highly-fluent-is-beautiful-and-creative relation when testing repeated exposure and figure-ground contrast. Prototypicality displayed a high-fluency–is-beautiful relation, with creativity judgments unaffected. Visual complexity displayed a consistent disfluent-is-creative effect, with mixed results for beauty. For creativity (but not beauty) evaluations, increased saliency of visual complexity led to discounting fluent-is-creative effects, supporting the hypothesis that there are at least two fluency pathways to creativity judgments that take both originality and quality into account.